The Inner Opium War

"I chose this book to contrast with Peter Ward Fay’s, because of its immersion in the Chinese side of the story. Polachek behaves a little like a detective in this book, picking his way through an intricate, opaque mass of internal Chinese sources, policy debates and abstruse connections between members of the imperial bureaucracy – which make you think that not very much has changed in Chinese politics over the last 150 years. The Opium War in both Chinese and Western historiography has taken on a momentous significance as an almost mystically pre-destined clash between the two big civilisations of China and Great Britain. Polachek, by contrast, argues amongst other things that the Opium War was triggered by Chinese policy makers in a fit of bureaucratic haste. Many of the key policy makers in China were too busy worrying about domestic issues to size up the new British enemy on their maritime borders. Very few top-level officials had actually thought through the implications of the Qing crackdown on opium in the 1830s on relations with Great Britain. So, in Polachek’s account, the Opium War becomes an almost accidental occurrence."